[nodoodles]

It’s not wrong, but also checklist is not a practical way to approach this job, in my experience.

All the listed activities (and we could list 50 more) are situational and should build to the needs of your job goals. It’s not a hard job and trying to list every detail can be misleadingly overwhelming.

Aim to help people you manage grow, the team be a team, peers be better off than they would be without you, and your company make money or whatever it makes - and you’ll be doing well at the job.

[simonw]

"It’s not a hard job"

Very much disagree on that point.

If you're coming into engineering management from engineering (the most common path) you're moving from managing computers, which always do exactly what you tell them to do, to managing people - a very, very different kind of thing!

I have enormous respect for the skill of people who do this job really well.

[nodoodles]

You’re right - it is not the job for everybody. Perhaps the perverse incentives pushing folks into management for career growth have contributed to lot of human-job misalignment and to this narrative of almost superhuman effort. In what I’ve seen, EM culture tends to keep building that myth up.

Any job is sometimes frustrating, taxing, etc, no argument there either. Big plus one to computers winning on predictability, but humans get the point on autonomy (EM just needs to let go of the idea of telling anyone what they must do). But fundamentally, assuming the personality traits match (a lot is learnable), it is no rocket science, just people.

PS i reread earlier comment and see how it can come off. Not speaking as a engineer who doesn’t understand their manager’s job, but as someone who has been doing it for a decade and managed/mentored/coached number of newer EMs on the way :)

[dasil003]

The difficulty an EM job depends a lot on the situation. If you have a strong and healthy team with sufficient skill and technical chops then it's mostly about staying out the way. On the other hand, if you have a weak team surrounded by various kinds of organizational dysfunction it can be an incredibly difficult and taxing job.

[nodoodles]

It’s certainly an unpredictable one, never know what new fires the next week brings, or when they set off a chain reaction pushing the whole team to the brink of despair. Being able to have mental boundaries and (this sounds cold) emotional distance helps a lot!

[dasil003]

That's a flippant dismissal of my point. I'm not talking about chaos. I'm talking about truly difficult situations, like the team not having the skills to meet management expectations, or a dysfunctional dynamics where product or finance are making engineering decisions, or Peter-principle cases being promoted into middle management without the maturity and judgement to make good decisions. If you think the biggest challenge to engineering management is compartmentalization, then you haven't faced truly hard problems in an environment with high expectations. These things come on a continuum from easy to impossible, and it's never quite clear where that line is.

[nodoodles]

No dismissal intended! Was agreeing with you on the premise of a barrage of difficult situations (=‘fires’) in the job. The kinds of challenges you list are to be expected and normal business as usual, but imho doesn’t have to make the role more taxing or difficult than any people-facing corporate job with some accountability. It’s luckily not a boring job either (ymmv, boring = unchallenging). Most situations line or middle manager faces have been solved countless times before, and either have reusable playbooks / mental models to start with, or can benefit from applied common sense and creativity. It’s mostly fun.

The point I badly tried to make was around EMs mental state & health - managing emotional coupling creates space, necessary for the EM to find pragmatic solutions, or workarounds for things far beyond control. (Not that occasionally the problems don’t keep me awake at night, but that was also true for technical challenges as an engineer.)

[koliber]

A checklist is helpful. It helps you to think of all the things that you would not normally think of. It’s not something that can be checked off 100%. It is a tool to bring your attention to things that would not otherwise occur to you.